Comparative Planning Cultures

Are there significant variations in the ways planners in different nations have influenced urban, regional, and national development? Do such variations arise from differences in planning cultures, meaning the collective ethos and dominant attitude of planners in different nations towards the appropriate roles of the state, market forces, and civil society? How are such professional cultures formed? Are they indigenous and immutable, or do they evolve with social, political, and economic changes both within and outside the national territories? Specifically, what has been the impact of the intensification of global interconnectedness in trade, capital flows, labor migration, and technological connectivity on national planning cultures? Comparative Planning Culturesaddresses these questions, drawing on the planning experience in ten nations and at different territorial levels. The result is an understanding of planning culture that is complex and dynamic-in contrast to traditional notions ofculture that evoke a sense of immutability and inheritance of unchanging social attributes of planners. The volume concludes that there is no cultural nucleus or core planning culture, no social gene that can be decoded to reveal the cultural DNA of planning practice of any nation.